[EM] Strategic vs Dishonest

Richard Lung voting at ukscientists.com
Mon Sep 20 12:46:02 PDT 2021


That's like saying war isn't dishonest. One is doing ones honest best to defeat an enemy. All is fair in love and war.
A voting system that conserves all preferential information is unaffected by strategic voting, because one set or another of preferences cannot be excluded to bias the result, one way or another.

Richard Lung.



On 20 Sep 2021, at 7:55 pm, Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:

I know this is picky semantics to some people, but to me strategic voting does not imply dishonest voting. Is Approval voting dishonest? It certainly requires some kind of strategy. Suppose that your sincere preference is A>B but optimal strategy leads you to approve B but not A.... does following that strategy make you into a dishonest person? I would call it insincere strategy but wouldn't go so far as to call it dishonest. Does voting for a lesser evil make you dishonest? Are poker players who bluff dishonest? Not in my opinion because bluffing is a premise of the game.

On the other hand false witness ... smearing or telling lies about a candidate? Or false reporting of actual or fake polls? Or unilateral defection from an agreement? To me that crosses the line!

So one set of strategic ballots to decide who the finalists will be, and another to choose between them ... no dishonesty in my book, even if the first set of ballots elicits insincere strategy as expected. If you took an oath promising to use only sincere strategy, that might be a different story,  unless the oath was under extreme duress!

So let's not be too quick to use the judgmental term "dishonest" when a softer term "insincere" will do.

Just my opinion about shades of traditional English usage of these terms!
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